JOIN THE METAMORPHOSIS!
We are delighted and excited to share that the Lab opened its doors at our new location in Dublin, NH! As we keep adding our signature Caterpillar Lab quirk and chaos to the space we invite guest to visit the new Lab during our regular Open Hours on Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00 - 5:00pm.
There is still a lot to do to make this building a sustainable and long lasting place to explore, learn, and spread our wings. We can’t do it without you! Consider donating to keep our metamorphosis going!
From our Roots to our new Home
The Caterpillar Lab started in a one-room apartment in downtown Keene. We created a season’s worth of caterpillar programs out of these few square feet, with floor-to-ceiling stacked screen cages and host buckets lining the walls. Our first year shaped who we are–a small, determined organization with a disproportionately large impact!
The Lab got its first chance to stretch its prolegs a year later when we took over an old camera store retail space in the Colony Mill Market place building in West Keene. We expanded our programing, brought on a first wave of summer employees, and opened the lab itself to the public a few times a week in our first “open hours” events. This was also where we first organized a board of governors, achieved our nonprofit status, and started to plan for a longer future.
When the Colony Mill building closed to the public, The Caterpillar Lab searched for yet another new home, finding it in an unlikely place, an old granite building situated right along Main Street in Marlborough, New Hampshire, where we have now spent the past 8 years.
And yet, over the last few seasons, our thousand- square-foot space has been pushed to its limits. With a growing number of staff, an ever-busier schedule of traveling programs and exhibits, expanded open hours and in-house programming, and increasing work in photography, film, and research – along with maintaining what may be the largest collection of hungry and growing live, native caterpillars housed anywhere in the world –the need for a change is clear and urgent.
When a building opened up just minutes from our current home, I went to look, though without especially high expectations. It felt unlikely that something well aligned with our needs would be so close.
(Read about Sam's experience HERE)
The next steps are significant, and they come with real challenges. A move like this brings new responsibilities and requires us to further strengthen how we operate. It creates both the necessity and opportunity to grow as an organization–to improve our systems, create a broader and more dependable foundation of support, and invest more deeply in our community.
This is not just a move into a new building, but a step forward in how The Caterpillar Lab functions and what it is capable of becoming.
We hope you will celebrate this step with us. As we move into the spring and begin carrying our boxes, and our caterpillars, into this new space, we invite you to follow along and consider how you might be part of what comes next. In many ways, this is the beginning of a much larger process. If all goes well, we hope to purchase this property in the coming years, finalizing our permanent home after so many years of changes.